First Chapters
by Narsil
Summary: A collection of first chapters of stories I hope to eventually write.
1. Phoenix Rising

I claim no ownership rights to any of the works of Rumiko Takahashi, or anything I've borrowed from Scooter.

**Important Author's Note:** Like any other fanfic writer I suspect, I have any number of stories buzzing around in my mind begging to be released. However, one thing that I've found extremely annoying over the years I've been reading fanfics are fabulous stories that have been abandoned unfinished, and I promised myself that I wouldn't start any stories I wasn't going to finish. I've mostly been able to keep that promise so far (the only real exception being my _Lemon Flu: Aftermath_ story at AO3). But that self-control has meant that I've had to seriously limit the number of stories I have in progress, which is its own form of frustration.

So, this chapter and others to follow. Awhile back I had a poll on what my next two stories should be. The continuation of _The Raven_ won running away, and the continuation of _Chained World_ eked out a lead over this one. The _Chained World_ continuation has been started and _The Raven_ has resumed, but what now? I could simply continue this one, or I could have another poll. Either way, I've decided that I'm going to write a collection of First Chapters of the stories I'd like to tell, so that the next time I have a poll I can refer voters to this "story" before casting their votes on which story they'd like to see continued. And maybe the plot bunnies in my head will ease off, a little.

This story, working title _Phoenix Rising_, has actually been bouncing around in my head longer than any of the stories that I've actually be writing. It's the result of the usual malady of new writers, reading something and thinking, _I can do better than that!_ In this case, "that" is _Phoenix_, a self-insert story by Scooter (the only one I believe I've read). As with so many other stories, an interesting premise but not so good on the execution, and naturally I started thinking about how I could have done better. Whether this would be _better_ is a matter of personal opinion, but it should certainly be more _exciting_. Of course, I could hardly leave it alone without mixing in some other sources, so there's another plot device here lifted from Sunshine Temple and Trimatter's _Strained Harmony_ (still eagerly awaiting a new chapter for that one), and some others that won't pop up until later chapters.

And no, this will _not_ be a crossover with Sailor Moon. It will, however, be a Ranma-chan lockfic with some lemons (rated M, obviously), mostly heterosexual. If that isn't your cup of tea, you should give this one a pass.

* * *

"Forty years I've been at sea. A war at sea. A war with no battles, no monuments ... only casualties."

— Captain Marko Ramius, _Hunt for Red October_

/oOo\

Ranma forced herself back to her feet and stood glaring up at her enemy, the selfish bastard that had found the open water kettle, used it to unlock his curse and recover his manhood, and sought to deny its use to anyone else. It had been a long fight, and Ranma felt tiny tremors of exhaustion running through her, but she hadn't lost yet no matter how badly she was outclassed! Somehow she would find a way, and wipe that arrogant smirk off the face of the still-immaculate prince of the Musk standing a short distance away. Then she would unlock the curse and return home to Akane, and all would be as it had been before. At least he was standing on the ground now, not flitting about in the air like a gigantic hummingbird, so Ranma had a chance to get at him.

Then she heard a shout from behind her and to the side — Ryoga! The redhead whirled to find the Lost Boy running toward them, the open water kettle in his hand — the key to unlocking her gender-changing curse, giving her back her manhood!

"Ranma, here it is!" her sometime rival shouted, and hurled the kettle toward her.

Ranma eagerly dove toward the arcing kettle, and instantly realized her mistake as Herb shouted from what was now behind her: "No, I won't let you have it!" She could _feel_ the build-up of energy that was about to slam into her, unlike Herb she couldn't fly, there was nothing she could use to alter her trajectory — and from the corner of her eye she saw the second of the boys that had accompanied her, the bespectacled Amazon weapons master Mousse, with a weighted cord whipping from his billowing sleeve. Behind her there was a _crack_ of metal on flesh and bone, and just as her fingers were reaching for the airborne kettle's handle Prince Herb's final energy blast clipped her, sending her spinning, skipping across the ground ... as it engulfed the kettle. She caught a split-second glimpse of the kettle glowing fiery red before it exploded. The shockwave picked up the redhead and hurled her against the side of the mountain, burying her as the rocky strata weakened by her battle with Herb collapsed.

It took hours for Ryoga and Mousse to climb the new cliff face of what used to be a sizable chunk of a mountain and finally unbury the broken body of the still-unconscious girl.

/oOo\

Ranma lay on her back on the roof of the dojo, staring up at the star-speckled sky. The warmth of a cloudless summer day still radiating from the roof contrasted with the cooling night air, and Ranma shivered slightly as the faint breeze picked up for a moment (though it was more psychosomatic than real, certainly nothing like when he'd spent the night paralyzed on the roof after his second encounter with Kodachi). She considered telling Kasumi that she'd be sleeping on the roof again instead of in a futon on the eldest Tendo sister's bedroom floor (the very first thing Kasumi had insisted on after Ranma was released from Dr. Tofu's clinic was a change in sleeping arrangements), but she was finding it hard to push through the dark cloud that seemed to fill her mind enough to work up the energy to move.

The past weeks had been purest hell.

First, there had been her father, especially his reaction when his now-daughter came home from the clinic with Dr. Tofu's warning not to stress her partially healed ribs (said warning being that if she came back with her ribs and arm rebroken, he'd break her legs to make sure she stayed in bed). Genma's long rant had been histrionic and cutting, and ended only when Akane had physically pulled her former fiancé out of the room to keep the redhead from assaulting her father as Kasumi had calmly blocked Genma's attempt to follow the pair. Of course, that hadn't been enough for Genma, he'd had to follow that up by demanding that, since Ranma could no longer marry Akane and sire an heir, she had to marry _Soun_ and _bear_ an heir. For a few minutes Ranma had thought that Soun would actually grow a spine and reject his old friend's demand, but as usual he had eventually caved — until Kasumi had put her foot down, _hard_. Ranma couldn't remember another time he had actually heard Kasumi _shout_ at someone, much less her father. Even then it had taken her threat to turn the cooking duties over to Akane to shut up the fathers, and they'd been surprisingly quiet since.

But Genma had never sparred with his daughter, had even rejected Ranma's demand for a match after Dr. Tofu had certified that her ribs and arm had healed. And he'd moved out of the dojo and into his wife's small home.

_Mom._ Unbidden, the memory of the last time Ranma had seen her mother surfaced, the older woman's face tear-stained and crumpled, all bewildered grief. _Why_ had she let the others talk her into telling her mother that her son was dead? Of course, the fact that Genma had suggested it — demanded it, rather — hadn't meant much, had actually led to their last screaming match. Nabiki's offhand comment that Nodoka would probably prefer to hear that her son was dead rather than cut off "Ranko's" head while acting as second in a seppuku ceremony had given Ranma pause, though, and Akane and Kasumi's instant agreement with their sister had been the clincher. Still, she had never imagined someone in as much pain as her mother had been sobbing on her shoulder...

At least _some_ good had come out of this mess, the Amazons had already packed up and left. But even that carried its own spike of pain — hadn't she meant more to them than just a breeder for Shampoo?

Ranma sighed and sat up. _Ya aren't gettin' very relaxed, _she thought with a grimace, admitting her failure to find some peace in communion with her old friends. _Maybe you should check and see if Kasumi's ready ta call it a night and —_

"Ranma? Are you up there?"

Ranma frowned — that was Akane's voice calling quietly, but coming from Kasumi's room. Normally the youngest Tendo respected her older sister's privacy, certainly much better than Nabiki. And Kasumi's room was dark. "Yeah," Ranma called back just as quietly. "What's up?"

"Get down here, now ... please."

Ranma's eyes widened — 'please' was a word Akane didn't use often, at least not when her fiancé was involved. Of course, Ranma wasn't her fiancé anymore (Ranma pushed away the stab of pain that thought caused), and Akane had been unusually gentle since by some miracle Ryoga had found the dojo, carrying Ranma's pain-wracked body and with a duck-cursed boy riding on his backpack. Still, Ranma couldn't think of a time that they'd been alone in the same room since then...

"Sure, get outta the way."

Moments later the redhead had swung through the window and across the bed to an easy landing. She repeated, "What's up?" Her gaze sharpened as she automatically took in Akane's mental state (a habit quickly acquired soon after arriving at the dojo). Akane was agitated, anxious — oh, plenty of anger, but she was scared. And on the floor beside the girl was Ranma's pack, bulging at the seams.

"Ranma ... Nabiki ... the fathers ..." Akane's voice trailed off as she struggled for words, then she burst into tears and threw herself at the redhead, wrapping her arms around the girl and burying her face in her shoulder. "They _sold_ you!" she wailed into Ranma's shirt.

Ranma's arms had instinctively returned the hug, and now they tightened as she froze in shock. She gasped, "They did _what?_"

"They sold you," Akane repeated, sniffling. "Kasumi overheard Nabiki talking with Father in his room. Some businessman approached them — Father and Genma — at a bar and offered a lot of money to become your guardian. They didn't even bother to ask why, they just jumped at it."

Ranma was beginning to shake as it sank in. "I always knew Pop was greedy, but yer dad ... is he really that gutless?"

"Father isn't ... okay, he usually takes the easy way, but this time ..." Akane sighed, then pushed away from Ranma to stare at the floor. "He's afraid we're going to lose the dojo to inheritance taxes when he dies. He was planning on passing it on to us when we married, but now that's out and he's getting worried. At least, that's what Kasumi says he told Nabiki. He thinks that now that they have the money they can hand you over and you can just run away. Nabiki's demanding payment up front to slip a drug into your food. Kasumi told me what she heard, she thinks you should skip the being drugged and kidnapped part and just go on an extended training trip, for a few months. She gave me as much food as your backpack will hold and asked me to give it to you. Just be careful out there — you're female now, and there are plenty of perverts that'll try to take advantage of you."

"Sounds good, thanks." Ranma replied, practically lightheaded with the emotion battling it out for supremacy: anger at the fathers, fear of what the stranger wanted with her, happiness that there people that actually cared about her, sorrow that she had to leave them even for awhile. She hesitated, couldn't think of anything to say, and picked up her backpack and turned toward the window.

"Ranma?"

Ranma stopped and turned back around. "Yeah?"

"I'm sorry," Akane whispered, still staring at the floor.

"For what?"

"Sorry that my father's a coward, that my sister's a money-hungry bitch, that you and I ... that I didn't ... I'm sorry."

For what felt like the first time in years, Ranma smiled. "Yeah, me too. See ya around."

Akane finally looked up and relaxed at the sight of Ranma's smile. "See you around," she said, then stepped forward and bent slightly to kiss the redhead on the cheek. "Good luck."

Ranma stared at her for a long moment, wide-eyed, before rediscovering her voice. "Uh ... thanks. You, too." She turned again, leaped over the bed to the windowsill, and out into the night.

/\

Leaning against the Tendo home's outside wall around the corner from the koi pond, Nabiki saw the dark shape of her sister's squeeze cross the night sky as she leaped above the narrow stretch of lawn from Kasumi's bedroom window to the top of the outer wall of the compound, then dropped out of sight to the outside street. The mercenary Tendo smiled. _Perfect, Kasumi and Akane performed_ exactly _as expected. So predictable ..._

The page-boy-haired brunette straightened and walked around the corner and into the house, sauntering down the hallway toward the stairs as she hummed a happy little tune. _Tomorrow Father will find out that Ranma is gone, and I can suggest to Shwei-san that I act as his eyes and ears here in Nerima until Ranma returns … for a weekly stipend, of course. That should be good for a few months until he gives up and goes away. Maybe I should hint to Akane that she can pay me to keep my mouth shut?_ After a moment, Nabiki regretfully decided against it. If Ranma came back before Schwei-san gave up, Akane would get mad when Nabiki told him anyway. She might even demand that her sister give her back her money, and either way Kasumi would find out. _That_ could make things ... uncomfortable, until Nabiki left for college. Best to be satisfied with what she'd gotten from her father and would get from Schwei-san. It wasn't like Akane had much money to speak of, anyway, not worth the hassle.

/oOo\

Nabiki stood at her open bedroom window, shivering slightly at the cool touch of a December evening breeze. She didn't mind the cold — preferred it, actually. It let her pretend that her shivers were because of the temperature instead of fear. How had everything gone so _wrong_? Schwei-san had been the very image of a lecherous pervert, trying to buy a victim for his lust that he was unable to acquire willingly. He had been happy to put Nabiki on retainer, and the time came to reciprocate when Ranma returned a month after she left. That was when the Mercenary Tendo got the first intimations that something wasn't right.

First, Ranma hadn't looked good at all. She was a little thin, and both she and her clothes were dirty — she obviously hadn't been eating well, or bathing regularly. Considering that Ranma enjoyed both good food (and lots of it) and a good soak in the furo, that said rather unpleasant things about her lifestyle on the road.

Second, Schwei-san's response when she called to let him know that Ranma was back had been ... well, not _disproportionate_, seeing how Ranma had been able to evade or beat down the thugs that showed up to "acquire" her, but beyond the resources Nabiki had expected a mid-level corporate expatriate of the Hong Kong Exodus to have. The small army that had shown up on Ranma's second attempt to return in October had finished off whatever hopes Nabiki had had that she was making a mountain out of a molehill.

Not that her hopes had been very high, after she'd tried to refuse the retainer after the first attempt with the excuse that she needed to leave for college. The file full of records of her minor scams and blackmailings Schwei-san had dropped on her desk when he informed her that she'd be putting off college until he'd acquired Ranma had been terrifying — sure, she was still a minor so the legal consequences wouldn't be much if he handed his evidence over to the police, but what it would do to her future schooling and job prospects would be devastating. And the fact that he had that file at all meant he'd forked out the money for some _seriously_ good — and expensive — investigators, because she hadn't had as much as a hint of anyone poking around in her background as deeply as the file had required. And he'd been smart enough to keep paying her after his abrupt alteration of her near-term plans, meaning if the hunt for Ranma came to the attention of the police she'd be implicated. No, whatever this was about, it wasn't a case of a sexual predator with too much money trying to acquire an untraceable victim for his perversions, the resources being devoted to the hunt were simply too much.

At least the second time Ranma returned Nabiki been able to drop enough hints that Ranma had realized Schwei-san knew she was back quickly enough that her head start had allowed her to escape that small army. But now Nabiki's sisters weren't talking to her at all, and Kasumi was making her life miserable by little "mistakes" with her laundry and "forgetting" that she was home at mealtimes. She'd been taking more nights off as well, and turning the cooking duties over to Akane ... as "practice."

Nabiki wiped at wet eyes. _Just the wind,_ she thought. _It's cold out, and that breeze stings._

Then her cell phone rang, and she sighed as she glanced at the clock — punctual, as usual. She picked up the phone and pressed the "accept" button. "Yes?" she asked, voice bland.

"_Any word?"_ The male voice was the usual, but also as usual he didn't identify himself.

"No, no hint of her. Anything on your end?" She winced.

"_You know better than to ask. You'll see your usual deposit."_

The call cut off, and Nabiki sighed again as she put down her phone and stepped over to close her window. _Where are you, Ranma? And what do I do when you return?_

/oOo\

Shivering in the doorway of a building empty for the night, Ranma hawked and spit out a thick greenish gob of _something_, giggling slightly as the spit punched a hole in the layer of snow covering the road, sidewalk and patch of lawn. The hole wouldn't last long — the thick snowfall drifting down would see to that.

She looked up, at the curtains of falling snow dimly illuminated by the streetlights. The view was blurry, jittery. She wished she could blame her now-constant shivering for the blurry sight, but she couldn't — with the lack of food and worsening winter weather as Christmas approached, she was drawing on the last dregs of her ki and her ability to hold off the cold was finally failing. Her eyesight was dimming as she sank toward sleep, and she didn't expect that she would be waking up again. After the last few months of trying to survive on the streets as a girl, the months of hiding and scrounging, she was finding it very hard to care.

For a moment an ember of anger burned as she remembered the dojo he and Genma had visited on their training trip and revisited after Jusenkyo, whose sensei had known of the curse and took her in after her second escape from Nerima — and whose home was now being rebuilt, because she'd trashed it while escaping the hunters that had found her (and left her backpack behind in the process). The only way they could have known to spy on Nakadan-sensei just in case she showed up was if her father had told them about him — and it wouldn't have been just him, Genma would have told them about the rest of the people willing to take her in for the winter. And she didn't know of anyone that her father didn't, she'd met them during the training trip.

But that angry ember died, too, as she felt herself sinking toward sleep.

"Hey, kid, are you all right?" The Japanese was flawless but accented, a foreigner, male.

"Lemme 'lone," she muttered. Couldn't he tell she was trying to sleep?

Apparently not, as she felt an arm slip under her knees and another around her back as he picked her up and began to walk along the sidewalk. "Come on, let's get you to a hospital."

It took a few seconds for that statement to meander its way through her brain, and there was something wrong about it — "No, no hospitals!" she gasped out. "Find me!"

The steps paused, continued again for a few seconds, paused. "Someone is looking for you?" he asked.

"Y-Yes." She was beginning to shiver again, but not from the cold. If Schwei-san's thugs caught up with her now there'd be no way she could hold them off, much less escape. When the man holding her started walking again she tried to struggle, tried to pull on the dregs of her ki, but found the world again going more gray than the falling snow warranted.

"Easy, I'm not taking you to a hospital."

Ranma sagged in relief at the words, and her relaxation was enough to ease her into sleep.

/\

Air Force Lieutenant Wendell "Win" Blake gazed appreciatively at the snow drifting down as he took the long walk back to Misawa Air Base, an early first night for the fighter pilot's leave. He might be an ace, but it was nice to simply gaze up into the night sky without searching for threats. Not that becoming an ace was all _that_ difficult, at Misawa Base, if the pilot survived, not since the Hong Kong Exodus. The flotillas that practically emptied Hong Kong of its people — everyone there that chose exile to every free nation that bordered the Pacific over falling under the authority of the Communist Chinese — may have solved the question of what to do with a population that could not be long defended and could not be willingly surrendered when Britain's lease expired, but the Mandarins in Beijing had been beyond furious. They had been counting on Hong Kong to magically invigorate their perpetually struggling economy, and watching all those prosperous businesses transfer their headquarters to Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Australia and other Pacific states as their workforces followed under the watchful eyes of the US Pacific fleet ... well, the Cold War had very nearly gone hot then and there and had never really cooled down since.

For a moment, Win wondered what his own career would have been like if the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping had succeeded in ousting Hua Guofeng from power. Would China even be a Communist power now, the last major Communist country in the world? Or would it have recovered its earlier promise of a free republic? And would things have been quiet enough that Win and his wife would have been posted elsewhere?

_Stop that! Tubal pregnancies can happen anywhere, and by the time we realized something was wrong there wasn't a hospital in the world that could have saved her. And even if being posted elsewhere would have meant the timing would have been different, there are other ways to die — maybe if I'd been posted to Germany our plane would have gone down crossing the Atlantic._

But he still hadn't expected to outlive his wife, certainly not by as many years as he probably had ahead of him — Mandy had been a homemaker, and he was a fighter pilot!

_You _are _in a mood tonight, aren't you?_ he asked himself, as he realized he'd come to a stop and was staring at empty air. He shrugged, smiling wryly, and started forward again. _Mandy would have some harsh words if she saw you. Good thing I made an early night of it. It was good of Stacy and David to ask me to join their bar crawl, I know they worry about me, but there's no point in ruining their own fun just because I'm not having any._

He glanced around as he walked and paused again — someone was huddled in the doorway of one of the old headquarters buildings and while it was a nice night for a stroll if you were dressed warmly and had grown up in the Colorado mountains, sleeping in the open without a bag was another matter. Whoever it was didn't look exactly warmly dressed, either. He stepped over, and his jaw clenched when he realized just how young the girl was. He asked, "Hey, kid, are you all right?"

"Lemme 'lone," the girl replied, her voice slurred and faint.

_Not likely._ He crouched, gathered her up into his arms, and rose to his feet to stride toward the base's gate. "Come on, let's get you to a hospital."

Within seconds, he had a frantically squirming armful. "No, no hospitals!" she gasped out. "Find me!"

Win slammed to a stop, staring down at his armful. _Find her?_ He glanced around, then stepped over to the nearest streetlight. Under the grime the girl's clothes were good quality and showed signs of careful tending, the red hair dirty but healthy, and he could feel real muscle tone under his hands. Whoever she was, she hadn't been on the streets all _that_ long — and in the brighter light, her face looked familiar...

He asked, "Someone is looking for you?"

"Y-Yes."

Win could feel her beginning to shiver, and suspected that it wasn't from cold. He thought of all the forms entailed in signing someone into a hospital, even for someone that couldn't be identified — _especially_ for someone that couldn't be identified. _Right._ He resumed his walk to the base's gates, and felt his armful resume struggling. "Easy," he said, "I'm not taking you to a hospital."

The struggling stopped, and within seconds the girl went limp.

The two guards at the gate saluted as Win approached, eyeing the girl in his arms. "Hey, LT, what's with the armload?" one of the two asked.

"Found her in a doorway a few blocks back," Win replied. "She's not exactly warmly dressed, a night like tonight will kill her."

"Gotcha. Do you want me to summon a medic, have her taken to the hospital?"

Win shook his head. "No, Airman, she isn't that bad off, yet." _I hope._ "A ride to my apartment would be appreciated, though."

"You got it."

/\

Win thanked the flight chief that had driven him the rest of the way home for unlocking and opening the door to his apartment. Taking back his keys, he backed into his apartment, kicked the door closed, used the side of his arm to flip on the lights, and headed for his bedroom.

In the bedroom, he deposited his armful on his bed and quickly stripped off her wet clothes (noting the lack of a bra and presence of boxers instead of panties), bundled up her nude body in his blankets, and headed to the kitchen for Ziploc sandwich bags and the hot water faucet — improvised hot water bottles to be placed at strategic locations about his guest's body, where the blood vessels were closest to the surface of the skin.

His immediate tasks done, he pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat, gazing at the sleeping redhead. He was _certain_ he had seen her somewhere before, he just couldn't think of _where!_ It wasn't like he'd been off base much — at all, really, since his wife's funeral — and the girl was clearly Japanese. And other than the one patrol that had turned into a dogfight with some Chinese fighters, the only official excitement he'd had had been —

Win froze as he finally recalled where he had seen the girl in his bed, in video footage shown to him by some people from an unnamed intelligence organization, of what he had at first assumed to be a cheesy special effects movie blockbuster he'd somehow missed — shaky amateur telephoto footage of the girl in his bed and a handsome young male Oriental throwing balls of energy at each other, eventually ending in the massive explosion of a tea kettle, of all things. The only way they had been able to convince him that it was real were photos of a collapsed mountainside and the news reports he'd seen of the mysterious vigilantes the media was calling the Sailor Senshi.

Of course, the very fact that they had to convince him of the truth had meant that their visit had been a failure. They'd somehow known that his wife had been Wiccan — and so a practitioner of magic — and wanted to know if he had heard of anything like what they'd shown him, anything at all: legends, party tales, rumors, anything. They'd been that desperate for information.

And they'd left explicit orders that he was to report anything he heard along those lines to his commanding officer, whoever he was. Were they or others like them whom his guest was afraid of?

"Well, damn, what do I do now?" he wondered out loud.


	2. End of the Island Way

I claim no ownership rights to any of the works of Rumiko Takahashi or DC Comics.

* * *

This story hasn't been bouncing around in my head as long as the last chapter, but does involve one of my longest running favorite comics (as in, decades back), "The Legion of Superheroes." Mind, this is seriously AU, a magick-tech alternate future history space fantasy Ranma/LoSH crossover. There may or may not be lemons, yuri & het, but whether on-stage or off- there won't be any female Ranma with guys this time.

The working story title is a play on the song, "End of the Highland Way" by Steve McDonald, another song from his album about the Highland Clearances. The chorus goes:

Gone is the Highland way  
No more the pipes will play  
Some say they'll rise again  
From over the ocean's end

* * *

Akane had been up for at least an hour, and had spent most of that hour sitting on the railing at the _Wind Dancer_'s bow where the sails billowing from a mystical wind that no one could feel were mostly behind her, gazing at the stars that, in etherspace, were always there. She had done the same on the voyage out to the refugee settlement on _Mars_, of all places, where she and Ranma had been sent to recover from wounds (mostly Ranma — the baka _would_ constantly throw himself into the worst of the fighting), and on that trip she had found the star-spangled ever-night a soothing comfort. She still did to an extent, on the return voyage to Earth, but couldn't keep thoughts of the war they were returning to from intruding on her thoughts.

Odd how things worked out — she was supposed to be the self-centered jealous bitch with the bad temper (just ask Ukyo and Shampoo, or Nabiki for that matter) and Ranma the kindhearted soft touch. But once the war came, she was the one that had the nightmares night after night while Ranma just seemed to become harder with each fight, each mission, each battlefield littered with bodies, not all of them soldiers or fighters, sometimes not even most. Not colder, never colder, anyone that watched him (or her) carry a wounded child back to the medics knew he still cared. But while Akane was breaking under the stress, fractures running through her psyche, that same stress was compressing Ranma into an unbreakable diamond made of pure Purpose.

So when Ranma had been sent to one of the Mars refugee camps to recover from their last mission, the Powers that Be had used the moderate wounds inflicted on Akane at the same time as an excuse to order her accompany him for rehabilitation. Or accompany _her_, rather — since hot water didn't seek _her_ out the same way cold water did _him_, Standard Operating Procedure had long since become to do the repair work on Ranma's female body so they wouldn't have to worry about a splash of cold water undoing all the medics' hard work. So the two girls had spent two months sharing a large tent with Nodoka and Kasumi while Ranma had spent her days in physical therapy (a long time for her with her healing factor, that was how close he'd come to dying) and Akane had struggled to strengthen her soul. She just hoped that two months had been enough.

"Akane!"

She twisted where she sat to look back toward the companionway — the ladder masquerading as stairs to the lower deck — to find the redhead taking deep breaths of what passed for fresh air on etherspace trips. All the air their ethership would have until they arrived at the Earth platform was what they'd brought with them from the Mars platform, but even with the way air tended to equalize throughout the ship during the journey things could get a little ... close ... in a belowdecks bunkroom during the ship's night. But at least they _had_ bunks, rather than the hammocks most of the sailors used, even if Ranma and Akane lacked the privacy needed for their favorite activity — Ranma actually swore it was even better than training!

But Akane doubted that their unfortunate lack of nookie over the past several months explained her spouse's faintly disgruntled air, and she smiled as Ranma walked toward her. "Still upset that I'm actually waking up before you?" she asked teasingly, twisting around and swinging her feet over the railing to stand up as Ranma reached her.

Ranma snorted, then tilted her head up slightly for a kiss — not one to curl Akane's toes like so many before, just a gentle 'good morning'. "I wouldn't care if it was 'cause you're gettin' up earlier instead a' me sleepin' in," she groused, then smothered a yawn. "I'm gettin' tired ... I mean, this crap's gettin' old."

"Give it time, Ranma," Akane urged. "The surgeons had your chest spread open like a blooming flower and one of them massaging your heart by hand to keep you alive — you don't just bounce back from something like that! Even for you, only two months is really pushing it." She shivered as she remembered her gut-wrenching fear as she'd watched the surgeons struggle to save one of Japan's elite warriors, fear that _this_ time Ranma would finally die and leave her alone...

Ranma embraced her, ignoring the wolf whistle from one of the sailors up in the rigging. "I'm not goin' anywhere, I promise," she whispered.

Akane clutched at her for a long moment before reluctantly breaking off the embrace. She said as lightly as she could manage, "We should be reaching Earth platform in a few hours. Let's sit up here and watch."

Ranma grimaced but nodded, and the two young women took their seats on the bow railing next to each other, feet hanging out over the open void and their arms around each other's waist, staring out at the seemingly endless star-studded sea of night. Eventually Ranma's head sank down to rest on Akane's shoulder, her arm around Akane's waist relaxed and dropped to hang limp, and the redhead started to softly snore. Akane just smiled, her own hand rising to run her fingers through her spouse's hair as she watched for the first signs of the blue, green, brown and white ball that was home.

/oOo\

President Anderson looked up from his desk in the Oval Office as his Secret Service bodyguard opened the door to let in his Chief of United Intelligence. "Okay, Carl, what was so important that it couldn't wait until the morning briefing?" arguably the most powerful man in the world demanded.

Carl Jensen ignored the long-familiar mementos and history on walls, shelves and tables all around him to drop a file on the desk. He said, "We finally found out what the Japs are up to."

"We have?" The president grabbed the folder and flipped it open. He quickly skimmed the documents within, lingering on the pictures of steep stairs reaching up to disappear into empty air with people carrying backpacks and suitcases climbing up, ropes coming down out of nothing to hoist up heavy pallets. In one picture only the lower half of one ladder climber could be seen. He whistled. "Damn! Portals to another dimension? Population transfer? No wonder they rejected our demands that they sequester their ki adepts! There's no way we would have allowed this, and they couldn't have hidden it while our observers were all over the island enforcing the ki adept sequestration. Two years, they could have been moving people out. Two years!"

The intelligence chief hid a grimace. 'Sequestration' — a polite term for herding the ki adepts and any family and followers that insisted on joining them into ghettos. _But what were we supposed to do? Their fighting skills aren't an issue, we could deal with those, but the way their connection of their life energy make them invisible to divination and clairvoyance magic —_ He forced his thoughts out of their well-worn rut when he realized the president was still speaking.

"The boys at the Pentagon want me to authorize the lights out ritual, don't they?"

"Yes, Mr. President, they do," Jensen replied. "And they need their answer immediately — our current window closes in a few hours, and the next one won't open for months."

President Anderson leaned back in his chair and rubbed his face. "I already know what the rest of the gang think, Carl," he said, "what do you say?"

Jensen hesitated. The lights out ritual had been a beyond top secret arrow in the United States' quiver for decades, but never hinted at — even after the end of the Cold War the ability to shut down all the magic items that were the foundation of modern civilization over an entire region was bound to scare a world already a bit antsy about the world's single superpower, and so far Research and Development hadn't been able to develop a counter. Still, they said that the math for the ritual was so bizarre that the odds of anyone else being able to develop it was practically nonexistent, even knowing it was possible...

"I don't think we have a choice, Jerry," he finally said. "By now the Japanese hate our guts, and while a couple years is the longest they could have been shifting people, the shop thinks it's unlikely — the best estimate is that they set everything up after the war started. They may not have a viable population moved wherever yet, but give them the year or more it'll take to finish the conquest and they will. And for all we know, they can open those portals from wherever they're going to any point on the planet."

"If they can, why haven't they?"

"_If_ they can, they might be waiting until they have enough people shifted first, in case it doesn't work out." Jensen shrugged. "It's purely speculative, we have no idea what they can or can't do. Which is why we need to move now."

The president sat for a long moment, face thoughtful, then finally sat up and placed his palm over his view-mirror's sensor plate. "General Masters," he said clearly, then waited until the mirror wavered and the face of a middle-aged woman with three stars on her blouse's collar appeared. She said, "Mr. President, what can I do for you?"

"You've seen the report from Japan on the portals?"

She nodded. "Military Intelligence made the find. Scary stuff, our people in Analysis are tearing their hair out trying to plan for the unknowable."

"I agree, 'scary stuff" indeed. Operation Midnight is approved."

The general stiffened, then sighed in relief. "Thank you, sir, that will simplify things enormously. I'll get right on it."

"You're welcome." President Anderson quickly ended the call, then leaned back again. "So the war's over in a month, max, and the genie's out of the bottle," he murmured, then looked up. "Well, Carl, I assume this just dumped a lot more on your shoulders."

"Yes, Jerry, it did, it's going to be a very late night." Jenson stood up. "But that's what I'm here for, so I'd better get to it." The president nodded, and as his old friend strode from the room he turned his chair to stare out the window at the White House lawn. It was a good half hour before he turned back to his desk and the report he'd been studying before Jensen dropped his starshell.

/oOo\

Nabiki jerked awake just in time to keep from sliding off the pile of coiled rope she was sitting on, halfway down the pier her family's ship would be arriving at. Shifting to sit up straight, she stretched as she yawned, then twisted to look down the pier toward the main platform for something to focus on, falling back on her favorite (and in her school years, most remunerative) activity — people watching. And there was plenty to see, the Earth etherspace platform bustled with people night and ... well, night, at least up here. Stevedores loading ships with the supplies they needed for the run to Mars or Venus, refugees boarding their own ships headed for the camps on Mars, ships from Venus unloading fish kept fresh by the stasis spells on their holds, and all done by hand and horse or mule, rope and pulley. While spells were dangerous to cast in etherspace, magicked items worked fine, but with the needs of the war using up all the enchanters' time and with what etherspace did to complicated metal machinery the platform looked like something from an historical drama set in the 1800s only with really bad costuming.

Yup, everyone had a task except one exhausted intelligence analyst getting a break from the constant grind of the war while she waited for the ship with her sister and brother-in-law, and she was fine with that.

"Nabiki!"

Nabiki jerked upright from her doze and whipped around at the shout and smiled at the sight of the ship turning to line up with the pier, her raven-haired sister bouncing in place and waving, a familiar redhead by her side with a hand on her shoulder. _Good thing Ranma's there to keep her from falling overboard_, she thought, chuckling. _Even if all it would do is embarrass her._ She wondered for a moment if Nodoka had realized how little chance she had of ever seeing grandchildren, plural. Akane _might_ be willing to use artificial insemination to have one child, but Nabiki couldn't see her doing it twice. And the chance of _Ranma_ doing the same were laughable.

She sighed. _Nice way to kill the mood, kiddo. That won't be a problem for years, after we've found a new home and settled down and can think about children. And there's no guarantee that even Ranma or Akane will live to see it — _especially_ Ranma. So enjoy the moment. I know _those_ two will tonight, after a few months of enforced celibacy._

As the ship gilded closer, slowing as sails furled (docking was tricky in etherspace, without anything like an anchor), Nabiki strode down the pier toward where she estimated the ship would stop, her forced smile turning natural at her last thought even if it meant she might as well go bar-hopping that night because she wouldn't be getting any sleep at home.

She had just reached her picked spot when she felt a shiver run through the wood beneath her feet, and suddenly the pier was shifting, wavering, almost as if she was standing on a raft out on a lake. _What the hell?_ She whirled around, staring back toward the center of the platform. Had a ship smashed into the other side? She didn't hear any screams or shouts, and the platform was held in place by its portals to downport, immovable!

And then she _was_ hearing screams, from far off on the other side of the platform. She stared, uselessly shading her eyes as she tried to stare through the streetlight glare to see if she could see sails above the roofs of the warehouses and taverns ... nothing ... and staggered as her balance shifted and fell on her butt on the wavering, bouncing wooden surface. No, not wavering, _tilting_. But that could only happen if the platform lost its connection to _all_ the portals. And that would mean that the entire platform was sliding out of etherspace, back into Earthspace — only without the portals, it would be falling into the Earth's lower atmosphere.

Her head whipped around desperately even as the tilt increased, looking for an escape. All around her sailors were chopping through the ropes connecting their ships to the piers, hauling as many civilians and stevedores on board as they could but they were too far away, she'd never reach any of them on time. Her only hope was ...

She scrambled desperately up the steepening incline, she wasn't going to make it, she somehow _leaped_, and slammed against the pier floor as it became a wall, the tips of her fingers catching the top edge. Ignoring the splinters digging into her fingers, she managed to get a better grip and hauled herself up on top of what had been the pier's edge and looked down. She was right, the platform _was_ sliding into Earthspace, and picking up speed, she had to move fast.

She ignored the diminishing shouts and screams as she stood up, balanced on the edge of the dock, crouched, and _leaped_ straight up with all her strength. Since she was leaping horizontally along the platform's plane of gravity it wouldn't try to pull her back, so she if overcame her own momentum she'd be good. As she soared outward into empty space, she looked down past her feet. _Please, let it be enough!_

It was, and she watched as the platform pulled away from her to vanish into the swirling green/brown/blue/white of an Earthspace that wasn't getting closer, or at least not so fast that she'd drift into it herself before she'd used up her own personal bubble of air in ten minutes, twenty tops — no suddenly finding herself in Earth's lower atmosphere somewhere over Japan or maybe the open sea, not that it would matter at that height. So now all she could do was keep her breathing shallow and wait, and hope someone from one of the ships was able to get to her in time somehow. She couldn't even turn around to look for possible rescuers, she'd never learned the aerobatics needed, never dreamed it _would_ be needed, and trying to struggle around now would just use up oxygen.

So she just drifted and stared out at the star-spangled field and breathed slowly, trying to use the half-remembered meditation technique her father had once taught her to empty her mind of what had just happened, the pain in her splinter-filled hands and her likely fate, and waited.

She didn't realize how well she'd succeeded until something slammed into her from behind, arms went around her waist and across her chest, and suddenly she was gasping for fresh air as Ranma's personal air bubble mixed with what was left of hers.

"Easy, I got ya," she heard the redhead say as she felt them being pulled back. Twisting around, she looked over Ranma's shoulder to see her sister pulling in a long cord tied to Ranma's waist. _Little sis is overdoing it_, Nabiki had time to think, before the pair hit the ship's air bubble, flew across the intervening space even as the ship's natural gravity plane tried to pull them down, and smashed into the youngest Tendo to pile them all on the deck.

Nabiki rolled out of the pile and sat up, wincing when rubbing a skinned elbow dug splinters deeper into her palm. "Ow," she muttered, just before Akane slammed into her, sending them both back to the deck. Her sister was clutching at her, sobbing, practically hysterical, and Nabiki awkwardly hugged her where they lay. "I'm all right, I'm fine," she murmured over and over until Akane finally fought her sobs down to sniffles and let go.

Ranma offered a hand to her wife and sister-in-law and pulled them both to their feet, and now as Nabiki realized just how close she had come to dying and began to shake it was Ranma's turn to hug her normally cool and collected sister-in-law, joined a moment later by Akane. As Nabiki fought herself back under control, she murmured, "Thanks, little sis, Saotome, I owe you two big time. Consider your debts paid in full."

The other two giggled as the three broke apart and looked around to find that while they had been otherwise occupied the _Wind Dancer_ had swept around and was heading toward the largest visible collection of ships, other ships following suit.

Nabiki looked back toward where the Japan platform had been. "What happened?" she asked quietly.

Ranma shrugged. "I dunno."

Even more quietly, Akane asked, "What do we do, now?"

"I dunno that, either."

/oOo\

_One millennia later:_

"Thanks, Top, I appreciate the help."

"You're welcome, sir, I hope you and your lady enjoy your vacation." The sergeant saluted, and Lieutenant Jo 'Nah' sloppily returned it, then offered his hand. He supposed if any of the brown-nosing sticks-up-their-asses back in Illium saw it they would have castigated him for an 'action prejudicial to maintaining proper authority', but it wasn't like the first sergeant of a company stationed on the fringe of the ever-expanding Republic (this outpost only a few decades old) would ever be in his chain of command — or any other first sergeant of any other company for that matter, seeing how all the members of Senator Brande's Legion were officially outside of the Republican military chain of command, lacking the authority to issue orders to regular legionnaires but also not required to obey orders from regular officers. Jo knew that his patron had a _lot_ of pull, but he'd still never been able to figure out just how the old man had pulled _that_ one off.

Besides, Jo had grown up on the streets and had what he, at least, considered a healthy disregard for all the nonsensical bowing and scraping that the senatorial families and their scions in the military often demanded. And the sergeant had been genuinely helpful, refreshingly free of the resentment regular legionnaires often exhibited for 'The Legion'. Even if it was because of the widespread 'scandal' of Jo's lack of proper parentage (he assumed, barely being able to remember his mother and not knowing who is father was) and the equally widespread 'scandals' of his lover's defiance of her mother, the matriarch of the powerful Watson senatorial family, both in joining the Legion in the first place and then taking a no-name from the streets into her bed without even trying to hide her 'shame'. The common soldiery delighted in both, and mostly respected those that made their entertainment possible.

Making his farewells to the other men of the squad currently guarding the small fort's main gate, Jo swung up onto the horse the soldiers had loaned him, adjusted the hang of his sword and the ease of reach of his two-barreled caplock pistol, and reined his horse around to join his lover and their servant. The two pushed their horses into a trot out the gate and onto the barely-there trail down the small hill the fort was perched on top of before beginning their climb up the magnificent snow-capped mountain the hill was at the base of. The two were eager to make the most of their vacation and didn't have as much time as they would have liked, though at least the portals saved them the months it would have taken them to get to Jenkin's Loan from Earth by ship through wildspace.

/\

Three days later, Jo was gasping for breath in the thin air near the mountain's summit. Tinya, linked to him by a long rope, was taking her turn to be the one breaking the path through the snow on the ledge they were currently following. Usually Jo would have been enjoying the view that would give him of her muscular ass in the tight leather pants she normally preferred, but her magnificent figure was hidden by the thick cold-weather gear they were both wearing. He supposed they could have worn more typical clothing with permanent warming/cooling charms, but oddly enough, beyond the delights of making love out in the open air of a forest clearing on a cool mountain morning surrounded by the burst of birdsong brought on by the sun's rise, the street punk and the high society debutante had found a mutual enjoyment in _really_ roughing it that went beyond getting away from the disapproving eyes watching them all the time.

Which was also why their Legion rings were currently in inner pockets rather than on their fingers — without the thrill of _real_ risk, the climb would simply be an exercise in masochism. Well, except for the thrill of being the first humans to climb to the peak of this particular mountain, of course.

Tinya disappeared from sight around a bend on the ledge, and Jo sighed as the rope between them began to slacken more with each step he took. Tinya had stopped, they must have hit another dead end. He glanced up at the rock wall beside him, frowning thoughtfully as he considered the angle — it didn't seem to have the overhang of the last dead end, so perhaps they'd be able to climb it this time. Then he walked around the bend and slammed to a stop right behind his lover, his jaw dropping in shock. Tinya hadn't hit a dead end, after all.

In front of them the perpendicular wall they had been hiking beside fell back into a wide, flat space bracketed on two sides by cliffs and a gentle slope to the peak on the third. And on the flat area in a heap against the far cliff face, was the ancient ice- and snow-covered remains of a wrecked wildspaceship.


	3. The Rise of the Hunters

I do not own anything by Satoru Akahori, Atsushi Suzumi or Steve Jackson Games.

This story idea is a fusion/reimagining of _Venus Versus Virus_ and _Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl_, though as usual for my stories taking much more of the serious nature of VVV than the more lighthearted, comedic air of much of GMG. The story ending will be quite different than both manga as well — I didn't really care for the finales of either. It is set in an alternate history steampunk Victorian Age, with a heavy dash of White Wolf's _World of Darkness_ setting (pre-reboot) with a different version of the Hunters and _very_ different version of the Mages (at least with respect to how the magic works — I thought that was _way_ overpowered — and no Technocracy). The Steam Tech described at the end of the chapter won't play any real role in the first story, but may become important if there are sequels.

Just to be clear(er), in _Venus Versus Virus_ you have a teenage girl - a civilian by anyone's definition and diabetes-inducingly sweet - who apparently by accident finds herself the "secret" weapon against the "viruses," and so on the front lines of a supernatural secret war. In _Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl_, you have a teenage boy, more than a little effeminate - who is trying to deal with being rejected by the girl he loves by looking for flowers in the hills above his home city when he is hit and almost killed by an alien spaceship. The spaceship's pilot heals him, but inadvertently changes his sex to female in the process. The rest of the series is a little bit about her adjustment to her new sex, but mostly is about a love triangle involving her childhood (girl)friend and the girl she'd originally confessed to competing for her affections interspersed by the alien studying just what "love" is all about. And of course, I'm changing the setting beyond all recognition.

On a separate note, for the many that don't read my _Yrthbound_ story, I have a poll up on my profile page on whether I should start another story as soon as I finish my next or wait until I've finished another. As always I don't consider the results binding on my final decision, but will take the poll into account.

* * *

_Oakland, California, 1898_

Asuta whipped his bicycle around a slow-moving, rare steamcar (at least in that part of the city) and coasted to a stop next to a brunette standing on the cracked and broken sidewalk. In spite of the late hour, both were still in their school uniforms. "Have you found him?" the brown-haired rider demanded.

Tomari shook her head, hard enough that the twin ponytails on each side of her head slapped her cheeks. "No, he isn't anywhere!" She glared at Asuta. What did you _say_ to him?" she demanded.

"I didn't say anything!" Asuta protested. "He was fine at lunch, then he never showed up for the afternoon classes, I don't know _what_ happened!"

"He confessed to Yasuna."

Both teenagers whirled to find Ayuki standing between the two buildings behind them. The raven-haired girl pushed her glasses further up her nose with one finger as she continued, "Yasuna did not respond well. I saw her run away, and in class later it looked like she'd been crying."

The other two teens slumped at the news—_they_ had been the ones to encourage their friend to confess his feelings. Asuta suddenly pounded a fist on his bike's handlebars. "That makes no sense!" he insisted. "With all the time they spend together on gardening projects, the way she smiles at him — the way she actually _looks_ at him like no other guy — she _likes_ him. So why would she refuse to be his girlfriend?"

Ayuki just shrugged, and Tomari turned to look down the street toward the wooded hills to the east, lit up by the late afternoon sun. "Well, now we know where Hazumu is — he'll be up there collecting meadow flowers, like he always does when he's feeling down." She glanced at Asuta and noted the sweat stains under the armpits of his white shirt, lifted an arm to sniff the puffy sleeve of her own white blouse, glanced down at her dirt-stained past-the-knees red skirt, and grimaced. "Hazumu will get back when he gets back, let's head to the dorms and cleaned up before we miss dinner and try to fix things in the morning."

/oOo\

Ignoring the sweat stains spreading on the white shirt of his school uniform and the dirt ground into the knees of his dark trousers, a slim, redheaded Caucasian boy stared at the wildflowers scattered over the sun-dappled mountain meadow and realized that he'd made a serious mistake. This was the meadow where Hazumu had first run into Yasuna — literally. He'd caught his foot on a root going around a tree and had slammed right into her, knocking her onto her back and falling on her. Not exactly the best way to get acquainted with an until-then distant classmate, but after the mutual blush-inducing embarrassment of being close enough to a member of the opposite sex to share breath she had taken it in stride. He'd been looking for flowers for his garden on the school rooftop and she had been separated while enjoying a hike and picnic with her parents temporarily back from their missionary work in Japan. She'd helped him gather flowers and he'd helped her find her parents and given some of those flowers to her mother, and for awhile all had been right with the world.

Since that day the two had met daily, studying together, tending the rooftop garden — she'd even eaten with him and his parents when they'd visited, between publishing their joint paper on the folkways of Amazon jungle aborigines and leaving for their expedition to study the African pygmies. (Oddly, his mother had seemed to alternate between knowing looks and happy smiles the entire visit.)

It had been his lifelong friend Tomari who had finally pushed him to admit — to himself as much as her — that his feelings for the quiet, refined raven-haired girl were more than just friendship, and once he did she and his best (only, actually) male friend Asuta had pushed him to admit his feelings to Yasuna ... and pushed, and pushed, and pushed, until _finally_ he had screwed up his courage and ...

For a moment, the memory of Yasuna's face sprang into the redheaded boy's mind, that first split second when he'd been _sure_ he'd seen pure joy shining from her eyes ... just before they'd filled with tears and she had run away, sobbing.

He pushed the memory away and looked out across the meadow. _This was a bad idea_, he thought sadly. Still, the view from here was magnificent. He walked to the edge of the cliff along the west side of the meadow and looked out across the city of Oakland — the sea of houses that had spread out even in the few years he had known of the view, much less in the years since his parents had arrived to study the ways of the long-secret Japanese Christians that had immigrated after that nation had become an ally by treaty of the United States. (Much to Great Britain's displeasure, not that US had cared much about the British Empire's tender feelings after the mother country had helped the Confederacy win its freedom — as the US had further demonstrated when it had seized western Canada by force in the war that followed that unhappy event and so joined the territory of Alaska it had purchased from Russia to the rest of the nation.)

And beyond the city the freighters in San Francisco Bay with smoke billowing from their stacks and even a battleship, and dirigibles silhouetted by the setting sun, coming in to pick up cargoes for the inland towns they serviced. None of the dirigibles would be jump liners servicing the colony on New America, of course, not this far south of the jump zone around the North Pole. Someday he was going to go out to study the fauna of other worlds —

Hazumu sucked in a breath as the angle of the sun finally registered — this had been a _really_ bad idea. It was already late afternoon, it would be nightfall before he could make it back to the school. And night was when the _things_ came out, and Tomari wasn't around to keep them away like she had the bullies when they were younger...

He ran for the hiking path back to the city.

/oOo\

Yasuna lowered her flute with a sigh, before setting it aside on her desk and rising to step to her dorm room's open window — her attempt to practice had been an abysmal failure. She had hoped that the joy she took in what was normally the center of her life would calm the storm in her heart, but now she was learning just how much her music had been a cover for her loneliness. A loneliness that had become so much a part of her world that she hadn't recognized it for what it was, not until Hazumu's confession after lunch, and now she thought about her only real friend that she had just thrown away, and her father, and stared out at a sunset that seemed the perfect symbol of her future — dark, dreary, and alone.

Finally, she closed the curtains and turned away to fall backward across her bed. Staring up at her white-painted ceiling, she murmured, "Oh, Hazumu, why couldn't you have been a girl?"

/oOo\

He had been right, he _hadn't_ been able to reach safety before nightfall, and now Hazumu was beginning to shiver, and not just because of the sweat staining his shirt. The streets were supposed to be gas-lit, but Oakland's Japantown was toward the bottom of City Hall's maintenance priority list, and the dark stretches were numerous, unavoidable. Already he could _feel_ eyes following him. And unlike the things he'd seen and sensed for most of his life, lately those eyes felt _hungry_.

Then as he neared the school, along the school grounds wall toward the gate, his eyes caught a sparkle on the sidewalk on the edge of a pool of light from a working gaslight — a brooch, a shining red faceted jewel set in gold filigree, beautiful enough to take his breath away. He knelt and picked it up, forefinger tracing the gold twists and whirls. _I can't keep this_, he thought, _someone is _really_ going to miss this_.

On the other hand... He rose to his feet and slipped the brooch in a pants pocket, eyes scanning the buildings across the street — the mostly empty buildings at this time of night, warehouses and offices in American style rather than Japanese (the immigrants didn't arrive with enough funds for extensive renovations, mostly just happy to have a home — though that was changing). There was no way he was going to be able to find who the brooch belonged to, there were simply too many people passing through during the day. It had to belong to someone passing through, the brooch was clearly Western so it wasn't an heirloom of a local family. And he couldn't simply go from door to door, someone would claim it whether it belonged to them or not and he'd have no way of knowing if they were lying —

He never did know what alerted him to the presence of some_thing_ behind him, but he whirled around, looked up, and froze in place, his eyes wide in shock — he'd been half-seeing half-sensing things all his life, but nothing like the tentacled, flaky-skinned, pustule-covered, diseased-looking _thing_ glaring at him through its single huge bloodshot eye from where it sat on top of the school grounds wall. It opened its lipless mouth to reveal jagged teeth and _hissed_, and as it lifted itself up on its tentacles all Hazumu could do was stare as the thought _I'm going to die, I'm going to die_ racing over and over through his mind.

The _thing_'s mouth stretched open wider and wider until it seemed as if it was going to split in half, a slimy mold-green tongue slithered out to run along its lower teeth, then it sprang toward Hazumu and those teeth seemed to fill his vision — and two massive thunderclaps shattered the night as the _thing_ jerked to the side, slamming into one shoulder to knock his spinning to the cobblestoned street. He levered himself up on one elbow and looked around frantically for the _thing_ that had tried to _eat_ him to find it lying beyond him in the middle of road. Thick steam rose from the unmoving body and an evil-smelling stench filled the night air. Even as he stared it collapsed into itself, turned to dust, and a light breeze swept both dust and stench away.

"Aren't you out a little late?"

Hazumu twisted wildly around at the sound of the voice to find a young woman — Caucasian, with platinum-blond ponytails over each ear, dressed in a black dress split down the middle with a panel preserving modesty, billowing sleeves and a high collar, a cross on a chain around her neck. She stood a few yards away, calmly removing two empty cartridges from the open cylinder of a massive revolver. The dress was scandalously short, barely covering her knees, and he realized that she wasn't more than a few years older than he was, her body slimly curved. She would have been attractive if not for the large, off-putting black patch with an embroidered pointed cross over one eye and the coldness that even in the dim glow of the streetlight seemed to lurk in the single eye that gazed calmly down at him.

She finished replacing the spent bullets, snapped the cylinder closed with a snap of her wrist, shoved the revolver into a heavy holster belted to her waist, and asked, "Well?"

"Uhhh ... what?" Hazumu replied half-unconsciously. He sat up and dabbed at several scrapes as he struggled to comprehend what had just happened.

She rolled her eye and repeated in a long-suffering tone, "Aren't you out a little late?"

"Oh!" Hazumu bolted to his feet. "I'm late!" He whirled and began to run toward the gate only to pause, then turned back around and bowed deeply to the girl. "Thank you for saving my life," he said softly, then turned back around and raced for the gate. He was in _so_ much trouble...

/\

Lucia watched the boy disappear through the school's open gates, eyebrow lifted in bemusement. "Well, _that_ was ... unexpected," she murmured.

"Yes, it was. What a polite young man."

Lucia glanced back over her shoulder at the earth-haired, thin, goateed and mustached, elegantly dressed man standing behind her. She shrugged. Reaching into the purse attached to her belt, she pulled out an open pack of cigarettes and some matches, tapped one out and lit it up, then turned toward the alley that her guardian had come out of. "He's one more sheep to be protected.

Nash followed her. After a moment, he said, "I'm still not entirely reconciled to using children as bait. It's dangerous."

Reaching the dark shadows of the alley, Lucia turned to lean back against the wall and sighed. "We've already discussed this," she said in the tired tone of one rehashing an old argument. "The children are already in danger, one's even disappeared — as good as dead. This virus is disturbingly clever, hiding in the shadows and feeding on dregs to stay unnoticed. The brooch will lure it out, and it will take long enough to ooze from its hiding place for me to get there. The children will be in no more danger than they already are."

Voice softening, she continued, "Go back to the shop, Nash, get some sleep. We aren't both needed, once the virus is out in the open it'll be easy enough to handle. But if it resists the brooches pull long enough you may need to spell me."

Nash hesitated, but finally nodded. "Be careful, Lucia," he murmured. _You're all I have left_ hung between the two, unsaid.

"I will," Lucia promised, forcing a faint smile.

Nash returned the smile, then turned and strode down the alley.

Lucia turned back to stare at the school, only the faint glow of the tip of her cigarette visible in the night's shadows in which she hid.

* * *

JUMP LINER TL(5+N)

This semirigid airship travels the polar regions, where its paraplanetary jump drive allows instantaneous travel to other worlds. It carries 30 tons of cargo and mail on each trip, plus 3 tons of provisions. There are cabins for 2 first-class and 8 second-class passengers, and 10 third-class bunks. A comfortable salon is available, as well as a sick bay in case of emergency.

The modern environmental controls ensure passenger and crew comfort even in the worst arctic ice-storm. A very-long-range wireless communicator allows contact with nearby vessels or distant port facilities. A 200-power astronomical telescope and a dedicated Complexity-3 calculator give +3 to the navigator's Astronomy rolls.

A 1,200-kW fuel cell system supplies the ship's power. Mechanical energy for the jump drive is diverted from the aerial propeller engine via a clutch. Time to ready the jump drive depends on propeller setting, from almost a full day to less than two hours.

Hammocks are provided for two crew shifts, each consisting of 24 gasbag riggers, three chiefs, a mechanic, and two gunners/lookouts. The ship's cook and porter are also assigned hammocks. Bunks are provided for two bridge crew shifts, each consisting of a pilot, a navigator, and a wireless operator. The jump engineer and the ship's medic are also assigned bunks. A shared cabin is provided for the captain and the first officer.

Maximum cruising range is 2,500 miles.

PARAPLANETARY JUMP DRIVE TL(5+N)

The paraplanetary jump drive uses jump points located in the polar regions of terrestrial planets. It is normally mounted on an airship, due to the wide variation in polar terrain to be found on different worlds.

Vessels can only utilize the jump drive within 0.01 planetary diameters of a planet's north or south pole; on Earth, this is a distance of 80 miles. Incoming vessels appear within the same distance of the poles. Most civilized worlds will have coal stations near the poles to serve interstellar airship traffic.

The heart of the drive is a "jump crystal," mounted in a gimbaled hydraulic press. These crystals are unbreakable by any force known to man, but if sufficient mechanical pressure is applied and then abruptly released, they dissipate their energy (stored within the drive crystal itself over the course of several hours by drawing power from the airship's engines through a belt and pulley system) by translating themselves — and the attached vessel — from one jump point to another. The maximum range of this translation is roughly 6 parsecs.

Fortunately for Victorian adventurers, jump points only seem to connect worlds with breathable atmospheres and with temperature and gravity comparable to Earth. Most philosophers claim that the Creator deliberately arranged this network for the benefit of mankind, but a few free-thinkers consider them an accident of nature. There has even been speculation that similar networks of jump points might connect the blazing poles of stars, or the freezing gas-clouds of worlds such as Jupiter, perhaps used by unimaginable creatures native to those climes.


End file.
